REVIEW ARTICLE New Approaches to Neorealism in Italian Cinema Damiano Garofalo*
Modern Italy, 2020 Vol. 25, No. 3, 333–340, doi:10.1017/mit.2020.27 REVIEW ARTICLE New approaches to neorealism in Italian cinema Damiano Garofalo* Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy ‘Rome, Open City’, edited by LOUIS BAYMAN,STEPHEN GUNDLE and KARL SCHOONOVER. Special issue, Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies 6 (3) (2018), ISSN 20477368 Roma e il cinema del dopoguerra. Neorealismo, melodramma, noir,byLORENZO MARMO, Rome, Bulzoni, 2018, 228 pp., €18.00 (paperback), ISBN 9788868971120 Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film: Cinema Year Zero,byGIULIANA MINGHELLI, New York, Routledge, 2013, xii + 264 pp., £36.99 (paperback, 2016), ISBN 9781138233843 Neorealism and the ‘New’ Italy: Compassion in the Development of Italian Identity, by SIMONETTA MILLI KONEWKO, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, xii + 272 pp., £74.99 (hardback), ISBN 9781137541321; published in Italian as L’Italia neorealista. Compassione e identità nazionale nel dopoguerra, Rome, Carocci, 2018, 284 pp., €27.00 (paperback), ISBN 9788843089604 In an article with the challenging title ‘Against Realism’, Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe (2011) argued that Italian cinema studies needed to move forward. In their view, the abuse of ‘real- ism’ as a prescriptive as well as descriptive term had stunted research into Italian cinema of the postwar period, channelling it exclusively towards neorealist trends and thus devaluing study of the other forms, movements, auteurs and productions that emerged during the same period. This historiographical tendency, which Christopher Wagstaff aptly called the ‘institution of neo- realism’ (2007, 37), encouraged the development of reverential study and by the 1960s had assumed the form of a canon.
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